Director Craig Mazin famously obsessed over minor details like shoelaces and telephones for the HBO series, and adopted first-hand accounts of survivors to authentically recreate the Soviet Union of the 1980s.

NTV’s Chernobyl, filmed in Belarus, takes far more liberties. A description of the show says that the plot revolves around a CIA agent dispatched to Pripyat to gather intelligence on the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and the Russian counterintelligence agent sent to track him down.

If it sounds like fiction, that’s because it is. But the director, Alexey Muradov, says the show “will tell viewers about what really happened back then”.

“There is a theory that the Americans had infiltrated the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and many historians do not deny that on the day of the explosion an agent of the enemy’s intelligence services was present at the station,” Muradov told the tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, which said the show “proposes an alternative view on the tragedy in Pripyat”.